An estimated 200,000 new brain tumors are diagnosed per year in North America. Of these, more than 50,000 cases are primary tumors. Primary brain cancers affect approximately 14 in 100,000 people and are responsible for more than 13,000 deaths annually. Metastatic brain tumors are more common than primary brain tumors, accounting for approximately 150,000 newly diagnosed cases per year. Lung and breast are common primary tumor sites that can metastasize to the brain.
Treatment options for certain brain tumors may be limited. For example, high-grade gliomas may be treated in some cases by surgical debulking, but surgery is not always possible. Radiation can be another option, either with or without adjuvant chemotherapy. In some cases, the preferred treatment may not provide significant long-term survival. For example, patients receiving radiotherapy for glioblastoma, even with adjuvant temozolomide chemotherapy, may face a three-year survival rate of not much more than 25%.
Another therapeutic option involves vaccines including, for example, tumor cell lysate vaccines. Such vaccines involve separately culturing monocytes obtained from a patient and tumor cells obtained from the patient, lysing the cultured tumor cells and collecting one or more antigens expressed by the culture tumor cells. The collected antigens are used to pulse dendritic cells (DCs) derived from the monocytes culture. The pulsed DCs are administered back to the patient, providing the patient with a population of DCs primed and activated by exposure to the tumor antigens, which can further prime the patient's own immune system against the tumor.
Methods that recruit a patient's immune system to help resolve tumors can benefit from advances in adjuvants that can increase the efficacy of such treatments.